Authoring: An Essay for the English Profession on Potentiality and Singularity

1. Authoring Accepted

1 AU T H O R I N G Ac c e P T e d A word on Academies: Poetry has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don’t understand how it’s made, & the trouble with these creeps is they wouldn’t know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight. Allen Ginsberg, “Notes for Howl and for Other Poems” Writing in 1959, the poet Ginsberg was angry at the initial reaction of literary scholars to Beat literature, especially “Howl,” and both his intemperate dismissal of their kind of knowledge and their temporary dismissal of his kind of poetry can be chalked up to the passing historical moment. Still, Ginsberg’s charge that university scholars don’t know how poetry is made carries some lasting weight. How much do English teachers know about the inner workings of working authors? In the academy, the project called English largely consists of students taught to read creative literature by teachers who do not regularly write creative literature, and taught to write essays by teachers who do not regularly write essays. No wonder that authoring, as we say in the Introduction, may be the one discursive concept from the toolkit of their trade that teachers of writing and written discourse use least. Not that English teachers are unaware of the distance between them and their disciplinary subject. Sometimes they have argued that the distance itself is necessary to their scholarly business. As we have noted, radical postmodern scholarship brackets the act of authoring in order to concentrate on contextual input and textual output. English teachers may have other reasons why they tend to keep authoring under the shelf. In many ways, the act of authoring does not fit the shape of their teaching practice, either pragmatically, ideologically, or temperamentally. What if the phenomenology of authoring, the reported felt sense of how it is made, were pulled out from under and placed on the counter, 12 AU T H ORI N G “in broad daylight”? In the eyes of the profession, how alien would it appear? Does real-world authoring look like something English teachers and scholars could live with? AP P ROAcHes TO AUT HO RI NG The English profession approaches the act of authoring in five basic ways. On the literature side, the most familiar approach treats it as part of the biography of well-known authors. Tillie Olsen snatched what moments she could as a working-class mother, sometimes writing on the city bus, standing up if she had to. Thomas Wolfe actually preferred to write standing up, with the top of the refrigerator as his table. On the composition side, the most common approach offers teachersanctioned guidelines for composing. Keep your audience in mind. Make sure each paragraph has a clear and circumscribed topic. Invent first, edit last. Two other approaches to authoring emphasize the instrumental: focus on tricks of the trade and focus on the study of authorship. With the first, composing habits are offered as literary history. By luck, novelist Kent Haruf acquired six reams of pulpy yellow paper—no longer manufactured, but a stock paraphernalia of his writing ritual. Or composing rituals are offered as advice to student writers. Set aside a time of day for writing, and write every day. With the focus on authorship, acts of composing are reduced to their social, cultural, or historical causes and effects. Literature students are told that Coleridge kept his borrowings from Schilling unacknowledged in the Biographia Literaria to uphold the “Romantic” notion of the writer as original and selfinspired . Composition students are told that their reader will know them not as they imagine themselves, individual “writers,” but instead will construct them as “authors” according to the persona they project through their words, perhaps an image of the honest scholar or the empathetic caseworker. The fifth approach to authoring does what these other four do not; it asks or surmises how authors experience authoring. Writing behavior, composing guidelines, tricks of the trade, and authorship can and usually do stand free of that felt sense, which includes drive, mood, proprioception, recollections, irritation at the barking dogs next door, and an endless wealth of inner life. Theoretically, of course, literary studies have long dismissed the phenomenology of Authoring Accepted 13 authors as unreliable, ephemeral, even chimerical.1 On occasion literary biography may provide some of this side of authoring, inferring it from...